Beyond Dvorak via Genetic Algorithm

ColonelPanic writes: "I switched my computer keyboard to the Dvorak layout about a year ago. But now I've gone and done something really outlandish. I tried to discover the most efficient layout possible with a genetic algorithm. It's weird-looking, but I am typing with it now. I put the gory details up on the Web."

Comments

Genetic?

[Anonymous Coward]

ADT GAC CCG AGA TAA CGA

What happens when you need a different letter?

Other uses of genetic algorithms

[Anonymous Coward]

I used a genetic algorithm to figure out the best way for arranging my feet when I walk.

Results:

left

right

left

right...

Call me ignorant if you like...

[Ignorant Cocksucker]

But wouldn't the perfect keyboard layout change dependant on what one was actually typing ? E.g. some languages make more frequent use of certain letters compared to others.

I can imagine Lisp programmers would want the parentheses '(' and ')' keys to be in a more accessible place than above the 9 and 0 characters.

What do other think - Should keyboards be dynamically reconfigurable dependant on the programming language in use ?

Re:Call me ignorant if you like...

[MadCow42]

What would be nice is a program on a floppy disk (ok, on a USB storage device keychain these days) that you just plug into the computer you're using, and it remaps the keyboard to your preferred style.

That is NOT a difficult thing to do, if you want to do it...

Kevin.

Re:Call me ignorant if you like...

[r0b0t b0y]

then do it

Re:Call me ignorant if you like...

[Phibian]

When I was in grade nine, I did a science fair project on the relative efficiencies between a QWERTY and DVORAK keyboard. We measured the distance between each key, and came up with the amount of work required to press each key depending on age/gender (in those days keyboard manufacturers weren't publishing their "springyness" stats yet). Then we took various pieces of text (eg entire works of Shakespeare, various essays and stories, various common phrases that use all the letters in the alphabet such as the quick brown fox etc) and ran it through an analysis program we'd written for the purpose.

It was pretty neat. Dvorak was the hands down winner for plain old English, but Qwerty was *much* better for Inuktitut (lots of k's and q's). We also looked at french, german and spanish samples, but I don't really remember how things stacked up (it was a while ago). I think Dvorak was very slightly better for most, although it depended on what you were typing.

Based on this project, I switched keyboard layouts. And then I found I couldn't touch type in Qwerty anymore. Apparently this is not unique - most people have difficulty remembering more than one or two keyboard layouts. So I would think that a layout that would change depending on what you were doing would be a nightmare.

Really, what would be ideal is to measure how much work it is for you personally to use each finger and get a sampling of your personal typing patterns, and then just go from there. As the original poster commented - the ideal keyboard may not be the most efficient, since you have to take into account how easy it is to work with. And I would think that how easy it is to work with includes how easy it is to remember :)

Re:Call me ignorant if you like...

[DGolden]

Re Lisp:

Several Schemes now accept [ and ] as a substitute for ( and ).

Personally, I just xmodmap ( and ) to where [ and ] usually are...

Re:Call me ignorant if you like...

[Dynedain]

Apparently this is not unique - most people have difficulty remembering more than one or two keyboard layouts

strange....I was able to touch-type with no problem when I ran a Comodore-64 emulator on my machine (lots of 'wierd' things like shift+2 for " instead of @). And I had gotten rid of my C64 about 6 years before. And I had never been able to touch type when I had it.

Granted, the keyboard layout wasn't all that different.....but there were many discrepancies esp. in the punctuations

Re:Call me ignorant if you like...

[big_hairy_mama]

Make humans understand xmodmap...

Jesus Christ, it was one of the most confusing programs I ever had to learn (when I first started using Linux). Unmap this, rebind this, keycodes, mappings, blah blah... and if you mess up, you can't even hit C+A+Backspace, since you've just unmapped all the keys!

Anyway, I wish someone would come up with a better interface for X keyboard mappings. Not a new API, but just a new version of xmodmap and the corresponding config lanugage. Anyone up for the challenge?
</rant>

Re:Mirrors?

[blogan]

http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz

choice of benchmark text

[Hollins]

I appreciate that he uses a lot of text for analysis. Ten years of email and C++ code are nice additions. However, the inclusion of the King James Bible and a few other works may have skewed the results somewhat, as shown by the presence of the word "thou" in the most-often used words list.

Re:choice of benchmark text

[Ubi_UK]

IN the same line of thinking:

-could, for instance, parsing the kernel through his routine create a 'kernel-hacking' keyboard?
i.e. specialist keyboards to do a specific job?

(and I would have CTRL-ALT-DEL right in the middle of my MS-Win-biased keyboard: now that would speed up things =)

Re:choice of benchmark text

[The Pim]

the inclusion of the King James Bible and a few other works may have skewed the results somewhat, as shown by the presence of the word "thou" in the most-often used words list.

Here's another dead givaway: 10377 sv

Re:choice of benchmark text

[dunham]

Maybe he uses thou in his C++ code. :)

Re:choice of benchmark text

[KILNA]

I had the same idea for a perl-optimized keyboard layout. But I don't know if having the home keys as punctuation would be well-received.

Re:choice of benchmark text

[ranulf]

even normal text and C++ programs may bear conflicts

Actually, this is something I've been considering for quite a while. I keep meaning to switch to Dvorak, having discovered it about 15 years ago [Under DOS, keybdk was a sure way of pissing people off using shared computers!]

But given that the majority of the work I do is coding, I'm not too sure that it would be optimised for this. I suppose it helps that common english words are used for variable names, although excluding 'the' most likely, and the fact that some languages such as Java tend to promote using shift a lot, and I'm very biased towards my left hand for shift, with my right hand drifting over one or two keys to compensate.

I might have a go at running his code my collection of source code to see what it produces, although this may be unfair. E.g. / and * will score highly because of comments, although I tend to make long lines of * for comment blocks by cut and pasting.

Problem with switching

[wikki]

ok, so lets say that you do switch and start using your new fancy keyboard layout. How long will it be before you forget how to type on a qwerty keyboard? Think of the trouble you will be in when you try to use someone elses keyboard. Plus programs, like video games, that come with keys programmed to do certain tasks are usually setup to keep the keys together on a qwerty keyboard, and will have to be remapped every time you install a game. Lastly, my hands have never gone numb from typing on a qwerty keyboard.

Re:Problem with switching

[rlwhite]

You're right that you can forget how to type on qwerty. How long it takes can vary widely based on usage patterns.

As a Dvorak user, I like to think that I've come up with an interesting solution (though certainly imperfect). Every keyboard I have to use in public always seems to be the flat, traditional style qwerty keyboard. My home keyboard is a natural keyboard using Dvorak. After a month or two getting used to Dvorak on the natural, I discovered that I could get myself to subconsciously switch between Dvorak and qwerty when i switched between natural and flat keyboards, based on its feel under my hands. At this point, I've been using Dvorak for about 2 1/2 years. I can switch pretty comfortably and accurately between the two styles, and the initial stumbling around when switching has gone away virtually completely.

This association of keyboard layout with keyboard shape does have its problems. I do have to use qwerty on a natural keyboard occasionally, and it really throws me off. Fortunately, this doesn't happen often for me.

Re:Problem with switching

[nekron-99]

you need to take care of this immediately. you ust take at least a 5 minute break every 1/2 hour of keyboarding. you must stretch your forearm muscles at least 3x per day. you must try a better keyboard like the kinesis classic. you must buy "repetitive strain injury a computer users guide" to learn all about correct typing and pacing. if you don't do these things, you will end up like me with sever tendonitis/muscle inflammation. you don't want to go there. every coder that i know has developed problems at some time or another. lots of people where i work have severe problems and must use voice activated software. some even have to have surgery. take care of this problem before it gets worse.

Re:Problem with switching

[Phrogz]

Yeah...let's say you do get used to your nice Linux operating system. How long before you have to go use someone else's running Windows?

So your argument is that you should give into the majority, accept an inferior product?

Re:Problem with switching

[Jace of Fuse!]

Most gamers remap their keys anyway. And if the game doesn't support remapping, it should be shoved down the developers throat, preferably coated in cyanide.

Agreed, and Agreed.

Most gamers do modify the game key layouts at least a little, if not entirely.

The best sign of good game design is totally configurable control, AND a very nice and usable DEFAULT setting. If the defaults are perfect, more power to the developer. If they aren't, I had BETTER be able to change them.

I personally have grown so used to Qwerty I'm not sure I could change even if it were for the better, but I'd be willing to try it if someone could convince me that I would notice an increase in speed very quickly. If I don't see results in more than a few weeks the time invested just isn't worth it to me. I type fine as it is and I've found that good posture keeps my hands from hurting unless I'm just at the keys for waaaaaaaay too long.

Re:Problem with switching

[Old Wolf]

That whole key pattern is awful - you use the same finger for up as you do down, which limits your effectiveness.
When I first saw the Unix method of h,j,k,l (left,down,up,right) I thought it was dumb, but it is in fact very fast.

Re:That's all fine and dandy...

[adamjaskie]

Actually, the QWERTY layout was designed so that people when typing would alternate between one side of the keyboard and the other as much as possible, making it more likely that if they hit two keys too fast, they would be as far apart as possible. However, DVORAK acrually does that better (alternating hands) and allows for people to type somewhat faster due to more common letters requiring less movement of the fingers. I, however, am somewhat skeptical about HOW MUCH faster it would allow you to type, and do not belive that the slight gain in speed would be worth re-learning how to type.

Messed Up file:/// links on the page

[lizzybarham]

That web page has some messed up links going to it's own filesystem:

• C Code
• PDF

non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[jafuser]

The problem I've had with non-qwerty keyboards is that unix seems to be designed for qwerty, as you'll notice most of the common commands (ls, ps, pwd, cd) seem to be fairly "comfortable" to type, whereas when I was playing around with using dvorak once for a few weeks, it just felt much more awkward to type unix commands.

Re:non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[Roy Ward]

Simple. Just use the unix 'alias' command to remap the most common commands to sequences of letters that are more comfortable.

Givem the large number of unix commands, the trick would be picking a new sequence that is not already used (and still nice to remember).

Although remembering the new words is possibly not such a big deal - I used to use a password that I could not actually remember the letters for, but I could remember the sequence of keys on a QWERTY keyboard. Imagine me trying to use that on another layout!

Re:non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[The Pim]

unix seems to be designed for qwerty

I can't really agree. Unix seems to be designed for terse abbreviations and acronyms, but I can't find much correlation to qwerty.

Ok, ls is a loss on Dvorak. I used to mistype it as rn all the time, which sucked on systems that had the rn newsreader! I created an alias that printed "You don't really want to run rn!".

But your other examples--ps, pwd, cd--are objectively easier on Dvorak, in my analysis. Not that they would win any prizes on either.

By the way, even the vi keys--hjkl--work pretty well in Dvorak. h is nicely situated below the right index finger, jk are adjacent and easily accessible to the left index finger--and to go right, I'd rather hit space!

I conclude that Ken, Dennis, and Bill were secretly Dvorak users. :-)

Re:non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[spitzak]

Because the commands are abbreviated by removing the vowles, they fail to type easily on Dvorak, which is designed for the fact that normal text alternates consonants and vowles.

Except for the hjkl in vi (which I don't use) it seems that most shortcuts are mnemonic on Unix, like all the Emacs commands, like ^N and ^P.

I'm suprised nobody mentions Apple's extremely positional assignment of zxcv for undo, cut, copy, paste. This must be a real pain on Dvorak, though you could revert when the ctrl or alt key is held down, but that would be a pain for mnemonic commands.

Re:non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[RovingSlug]

I had exactly the same experience as the parent post. In fact, I had to double check that I didn't write it myself.

Interacting with programs throught the keyboard has been inbred with QWERTY -- application evolution in the real world toword make QWERTY easier to use. And it's not just Unix. For instance, in MS Windows, the standard Cut (CTRL-X), Copy (CTRL-C), Paste (CTRL-V) are very QWERTY-centric, as well.

Eventually you realize almost all keyboard shortcuts and common commands have been optimized for QWERTY. If you switch to something else, you've made those unoptimal unless you rebind them... in every application. :(

Re:non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[big.ears]

The worst is playing nethack on a dvorak keyboard laptop (no arrow keys for moving around). Ugh.

Re:non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[Old Wolf]

I always type 'cd' with the index finger for the 'c'. Don't you?

Re:non qwerty-keyboards and unix

[Electrum]

I always use my ring finger to type P;/ (and the other keys further right), so 'pwd' is easy to type. I also use my ring finger to type Q, and do all shifting with my right pinky. I never really noticed that until reading this article.

Correct links found here

[Ridge]

The code: http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz
pdf: http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.pdf
the experiment run: http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.output

strangely the keyboard map is correct... :)

Re:Correct links found here

[tunah]

and for the lazy:

The code

PDF

Experiment

An improvement on the idea

[orangesquid]

You know what I really should do? There are certain words I *always* mistype with QWERTY, and I'm convinced it's partly the fault of the layout... I should use a genetic algorithm that evaluates based on speed *and* on letter arrangement, somehow. Not sure how to do this... but right now I'm running this command to see what words I mispell most often when using instant messenger:

nice cat ~/.gaim/logs/*.log|fgrep 'me:'|ispell -H -l|sort|uniq -c >~/badwords 2>/dev/null &

I love UNIX.

Re:An improvement on the idea

[Anonymous Coward]

There are certain characteristics that cause common typos with touch typists. If it's a common word, so people type it quickly without thinking, and it alternates hands each letter, particularly with the forefinger or middle finger, then the odds of swapping two letters is greatly increased. For example, "teh" for "the," or "grils" for "girls." Within the same hand, accidental swaps like that almost never occur. I think it's that your brain anticipates but mis-estimates when a keystrike will occur, and launches the next keystrike based on that anticipation...between hands you have a longer datapath in the brain, or perhaps a junction between brain hemispheres, which probably takes longer to process the "push finger, okay finger was pushed" signals than is needed by the next finger command to maintain a fast typing speed.

Re:An improvement on the idea

[valmont]

or prOn for porn ?

Re:An improvement on the idea

[t]

This problem has been solved long ago in vi (vim.org). Just use the iab command in your ~/.vimrc, e.g.,
iab teh the
iab THe The

Apparently people have written software to automate the generation of these lists from badwords lists such as yours.

t.

This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[XNormal]

According to the description in the article the algorithm has random seeding, mutations, a ranking function and survival of the fittest - but it doesn't have genetic exchange. New layouts are not chosen as combinations of two or more existing layouts.

Genetic exchange is very important for rapid evolution. The Earth was just a big bacterial soup for two billion years. Then sex was invented and then things started to get more interesting very quickly.

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[rgmoore]

The Earth was just a big bacterial soup for two billion years. Then sex was invented and then things started to get more interesting very quickly.

Just a side note, but bacteria do have sex. It's not necessary for reproduction, of course, and they only exchange a limited amount of genetic information in each exchange, but they do conjugate and exchange plasmids. In fact, they're remarkably promiscuous, exchanging genetic data with very little regard for things like the species of bacterium they're exchanging with.

It turns out that this is a major problem, because it's a key way for bacteria to develop unpleasant features like antibiotic resistence and infectiousness. They don't necessarily evolve those things from scratch. Instead, a whole package of nasty features that have evolved slowly over time- like multiple characteristics that make a bacterium an effective infectious agent, or a whole suite of proteins that convey resistence to a particular antibiotic- can be transmitted in a single genetic exchange. That lets harmless bacteria rapidly change into nasty ones without having to evolve that way from scratch.

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[jackal!]

Yes! Best of all, if you have a sex-based algorithm, you can seed it with just two sets, an Adam and an Eve, if you will. These would be, of course, the QWERTY and DVORAK sets. You should still end up with a result superiot to both, that you could brag to be the (un)natural decendant of the two sets!

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[ajs]

I find it interesting and somewhat disappointing that the parent article was moderated funny just because it used the word sex. Exchange of "genetic" material is not always a part of genetic algorithms, but it's certainly an "interesting" topic in that context and it was fairly "insightful" of XNormal to bring it up.

Oh well.

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[Twylite]

result superiot to both

Yes ... there are some issues with qwerty.

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[Dyolf Knip]

an Adam and an Eve, if you will. These would be, of course, the QWERTY and DVORAK sets

Out of curiosity, which layout do you see as Adam and which as Eve?

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[littleRedFriend]

Since he had so many scoring rules. I'm sure he could have gotten to the same or even better results with a dynamic programming algorithm in less time and lines of code.
If it was really a genetic algorithm he would have measured the real-life performance of all the layouts himself (that's what the real goal is), and use this information to select the ones that go to the next round.
Now, it is just an optimization problem treated in a silly heuristic way.

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[sean23007]

Yes, but what if the father Saturn (QWERTY) starts to eat the children because he knows that one of them will one day overtake him and become the most powerful keyboard layout in the universe? All of the new keyboard layouts would be consumed, and the mother Rhea (DVORAK) would become very unhappy that all her children were being eaten. So, she would remedy the situation by feeding QWERTY a fake child/keyboard layout, perhaps just a random one that perhaps resembles a rock that in turn resembles a baby. Once QWERTY consumes this rock/keyboard layout, the new baby keyboard layout, let's call him "Jupiter," would be left to be raised somewhere out in the wilderness by nymphs of some sort. After many years, once Jupiter has honed his skills, he could come back and vanquish his father QWERTY, thus fulfilling the millenia-old prophecy for a second time.

How's that?

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[Dandre]

The algorithm in the article is actually a cousin of GAs called an evolutionary algorithm. Typically, GAs have crossover (sex) where genetic material from multiple parents is combined. This would be easy to do with the keyboard layout problem, and would probably produce better results.

Often, EAs work better with smaller populations (~100-500) and GAs work better for larger populations, but that's more anecdotal than rigorously shown.

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[_vapor]

QWERTY is Adam, and DVORAK is Eve. QWERTY came first, just like Adam.

Re:This genetic algorithm doesn't have sex

[Old Wolf]

Err, just for clarification, not _all_ genetic algorithms need to have sex

Ahh yes - the so-called 'feminist' genetic algorithms, or 'catholic' genetic algorithms

We could all do this

[Roy Ward]

Different people would have different text samples that are representative, and possibly slightly different rules for evaluating the costs (although this would be very hard to quantify) ...

Just imagine all the slashdotters optimizing their own keyboard layout to their own individual circumstances ... no two keyboard layouts alike.

Re:We could all do this

[Plutor]

I can see smartcard-enabled keyboards. You walk up to a strange computer, put in your smartcard and it authenticates you, not only giving you access to your files, but also changing the keyboard layout to your personally optimized layout.

Then again, the 'strange' computers would have to record all keystrokes in order to keep the keyboard layout optimal.. I see some privacy complaints though.

Re:We could all do this

[Roy Ward]

> Then again, the 'strange' computers would have to record all keystrokes in order to keep the keyboard layout optimal.. I see some privacy complaints though

I don't quite see this - you wouldn't want your personal keyboard layout to evolve (unless there was a particular problem that needed addressing), because there is a bit investment in learning to type on a partiular layout. You'd train it once with your best guess as to usage, and only retrain if the version you were using was unsuitable enough to make it worth going through the learning curve again.

Re:We could all do this

[Old Wolf]

I can see smartcard-enabled keyboards.

Ah yes. We can have the smartcard reader as the most common letter, 'e' .. what next

True story from support desk hell

[mrneutron]

A friend does PC support (including telecommuter support) for a large retail company. A woman called in, to say that her home PC was acting stangely, and not typing the keys she pressed.

My friend went to her house with a new keyboard. When he looked at the old one, he saw that the keys were arranged alphabetically. with 'a' where the q is supposed to be, 'b' where the w is, etc.

She explained that she was having trouble finding the keys, so she rearranged them so she could find them easier.

Re:True story from support desk hell

[shaldannon]

For a moment I thought you were going to say she was this guy's poor wife!

Re:True story from support desk hell

[Hollins]

Actually, I think this is a good example of how product design should be driven by observing how people try to use things. A physically-remappable keyboard could be a good thing. I'd probably buy one.

Re:True story from support desk hell

[Dwonis]

I was thinking of something along the same lines. It would be very useful, especially for function keys (i.e. have a 'Help' key, rather than "Press F1 for help").

Don't know if it would cost too much, but let me know if you go forward with that. I want to buy one. 8-)

Re:True story from support desk hell

[Dwonis]

The reason I liked this idea was because applications could allocate keys much like they allocate other system resources, which would be a drastic user interface improvement. Instead of clicking awkwardward "button" screen abstractions, common operations could be placed directly on the keyboard.

Re:True story from support desk hell

[plaa]

When he looked at the old one, he saw that the keys were arranged alphabetically. with 'a' where the q is supposed to be, 'b' where the w is, etc.

I've actually done this on my keyboard. I've maintained the qwerty-layout, but the keys have been switched. Not very useful, but nobody except others that know qwerty can type on it.

Such a keyboard may also be good in teaching yourself touch typing. It's so easy to instinctively glance which key you are pressing. I've also recently bought a keyboard which is totally blank - no letters imprinted.

The only trouble I've had with it is the few keys which happen to be arranged on the new layout next to the keys in the keymap (i and v). Sometimes still when giving a one-letter command without having my hands on the keyboard, I glance to see where 'i' is and give the command 'o'.

My keyboard project (international dvorak layout)

[snowtigger]

Nice work.

I am working on a similar project: to create an international (european languages) dvorak-like layout for programmers or multi-lingual people.

In Europe, there is about one qwerty-type layout for each language or country. Most languages have some special characters (èàéüäö etc). If you want to use characters from another language, it may not be possible or require some special (difficult to remember and different for each layout) sequence.

What I am looking for is direct access to all special characters used by swedish, french, german, italian, spanish and programming languages (èàéäüö[]{}$# etc). Using dvorak as basic layout to build upon.

I will post more on this as soon as I have finished (after summer vacations)

We tried the Dvorak at my company years ago

[Phoenix-kun]

We had a concerted effort at my company years ago to see if the Dvorak keyboard would improve performance for randomly selected users. It failed. Any difference in performance was offset by the difficulty in switching back to the Qwerty away from the workplace.

Until a completely new input system comes around, we're stuck with the Qwerty for better or worse.

Vindication...

[Junta]

His little test is a neat idea. The one potential cause for concenr I could see would be that he was influenced by literature praising dvorak in defining penalties for various tasks. I personally think the penalities are likely accurate, but to a QWERTY advocate, research that show dvorak is bette rby using dvorak based criteria would be begging the question...

That aside, I really agree that dvorak is a better keyboard layout, and his final layout's resemblance to dvorak testifies to the advantage of dvorak. I've never been able to type fast at al in QWERTY, and it always hurts quickly (unless I hunt and peck, which is my general method). With dvorak I can touch type comfortably for a long time, and much faster as well. While his final keyboard layout may be marginally better than dvorak, dvorak remains the better choice for much the same reason qwerty is used, you can set up a dvorak layout on almost any system and os, but with this funky layout, you need to be running X....

Re:Vindication...

[alienmole]

I had the same thought about the feedback between the Dvorak layout and the final layout, but to me that invalidates your statement that "his final layout's resemblance to dvorak testifies to the advantage of dvorak." It may testify much more to the power of skewing a test, and how easy it is to get the results you expect, regardless of their validity. I'm not saying Dvorak isn't good, but rather that this guy's test wouldn't qualify as good science (not that it's meant to be, I guess).

Genetic Algorithms

[gfilion]

It is a good thing to remember that genetic algorithms are not garanteed to converge (generate the best layout). Also, the author doesn't seem to make the best layouts reproduce; it seems to me that this is one of the key features of genetic algorithms, so he may be missing some good layouts out there.

For those interested in genetic programming, OpenBeagle, a very good genetic programming program is available at http://www.gel.ulaval.ca/~beagle/ It's made in C++ and it's LGPLed.

Re:Enquiring Onanists....

[phillymjs]

I don't know which is fastest, but here's an interesting tidbit which stuck with me from the 'Self Love' episode of VH-1's 'Pop-Up Video':

The longest word you can type with one hand [using the proper fingers on the keys of a QWERTY layout] is "stewardesses"

I don't know where they came up with that, but it was good for a chuckle.

~Philly

Good for you

[Apreche]

You wasted a lot of time and effort finding a way to remap the keys on your keyboard to allow yourself to type faster. But you know what? Who needs to type faster? I mean, I know how to type on a QWERTY keyboard, and I can do it pretty well. The time it would take me to get used to a new layout would be greater than the time I would save by typing that little bit faster. Once you are typing fast enough, that's fast enough. Unless you plan on typing a copy of War and Peace.

While I believe you wasted a lot of time and typing faster is silly, I do think that we can apply your program to other things. For example I could log keypresses during games of counter-strike and possibly find a better key layout for myself based on my style of play. Pretty much anything we want to find the best of. Maybe we could possibly apply this to networking to map the network in the best possibly configuration for speed based on bandwith.

Good ideas that could be used to achieve better, useful, goals.

Re:Good for you

[AgTiger]

It may not be all about speed for him. From the second paragraph of the article:

> I used to feel a numbness of the backs of my hands after a long day with QWERTY,
> but I don't with Dvorak.

I type at over 100 WPM on a QWERTY keyboard, and I had much the same thought as you ("I'm fast enough, why bother?") However, when I read his statement implying that QWERTY may cause tendon/muscle fatigue more than DVORAK, I saw for the first time why I _might_ want to make the effort to teach my brain another key-mapping.

Something to balance it all out though: the frustration of trying to break nearly two decades of learned experience as to where those keys are might just kill me, and I doubt I'd see much benefit to a different key-mapping then. ;-)

Re:Walking is pass�

[Anonymous Coward]

We recently found a study that reports that skipping burns more calories than running!

That's because, when you run, you can do it at your own pace, but when you skip, you must skip very fast to keep ahead of the crowd of homophobes chasing you with intent to harm you when they catch you:

"Hey, Zeke! Lookit that there guy skippin' along! He must be a fag! Lit's go git the boys an' string his fairy ass up!"

Universal in a very limited universe

[Rui del-Negro]

All these layouts and evaluations are based on a) american keyboard layouts and b) the English language.

Even the regular QWERTY layout has some differences in other languages (ex, the 'Ç' in portuguese keyboards, the 'Ñ' in spanish keyboards, etc.), and the letter frequency is completely different. Most languages don't use the 'W' at all, and very rarely use the 'K'.

Most languages also have some specific 2-letter sequences that don't appear in other languages. In English you have 'th' and 'wh', for example. In Italian you have 'gl' and 'gn', in Spanish you have 'll', in Portuguese you have 'lh' and 'nh', etc.. These can make a big difference to the "perfect layout".

There are also some ridiculous mistakes such as the official french keyboard (which is AZERTY, and not QWERTY, BTW) not having the capital letter 'Ç', meaning you can't type 'Ça va?' (a very common sentence, meaning 'How are you doing?'). In the portuguese layout, the 'Ç' is a separate key, so you can use it to type 'ç' or 'Ç' (with shift). When I was working in Paris a couple of years ago I often wished I had my portuguese keyboard, not only because I'm used to QWERTY and kept making mistakes on their AZERTY keyboards, but also because it's actually easier to type in French with a portuguese keyboard.

Personally, I'm quite happy with the QWERTY layout; I would only change a couple of letters.

But I do wish people who write software would realise not everyone in the world uses the same keyboard layout they do, and that in other countries the same signs are often in different keys, making some key combinations impossible (ex., in the portuguese keyboard. the signs '[' and ']' are typed by pressing AltGr+8 and AltGr+9, or Ctrl+Alt+8 and Ctrl+Alt+9. So, when a program assigns some function to the combination Alt+[, it usually won't work on portuguese keyboards). Even worse are the programs (games, especially) that read they key's position instead of the character. So I press '' and get '=', I press '\' and get '~', I try to type 'ã' and get '\a', so on.

[sarcasm]

And of course, no keyboard is complete without the Windows "system keys"...

[/sarcasm]

RMN
~~~

Re:Universal in a very limited universe

[pinkpineapple]

And of course, no keyboard is complete without the Windows "system keys"...

You are kidding right? One thing I love about my thinkpad keyboard (beside the fact that it's has a nice touch) is the fact that IBM doesn't put these stupid Windows keys on the keyboard.

PPA, the girl next door.

Re:Universal in a very limited universe

[Elwood P Dowd]

You're absolutely correct that it's dumb for game designers to use key position rather than the designated character output. That makes things unnecessarily hard for furriners such as yourself.

However, expecting people to know that alt-[ is difficult to type in other countries isn't really fair either. Some software is made by companies small enough that they don't have the resources available to make a database of all the different keyboard layouts in the world and check if their program is gonna be convenient on all of them.

Re:Universal in a very limited universe

[valmont]

Actually, it is NOT proper french to write capital letters with accents or other character/pronounciation modifiers. Capital letters in french are immutable.

That is, at least, the theory.

Also keep in mind the poster's experiment was *not* meant to cover any other languages but english. That is precisely why he only used pieces of english litterature in his experiment. Anyone with half a brain can understand and accept the fact that each language is most likely to require its own optimal keyboard layout.

Additionally, while the result of his algorithm fits an arguably "limited" universe (face it pal, english is the *only* language worth writing in the universe, and i'm a native french myself), the algorithm itself, or at least the basic theories behind it, can be considered fairly universal eventhough one might want to tweak it to their own needs.

Now let's see if you can re-use/adapt his code for other languages you care about.

Re:Universal in a very limited universe

[valmont]

yea i like being arrogant. it makes people mad. heh ;].

i was not just talking about accents, the "cedille" below the C, follows the same rule as accents: it is what i'd call a pronounciation modifier and should NOT appear on a capital letter. it is not proper FRENCH grammar, which by the way, should not be compared to spanish grammar or spelling, as various languages have their own rules. again, proper grammar stipulates that capital letters be immutable.

That is not to say that this rule is often broken in popular litterature like magazines and such, but the rule still remains. Find me one classic piece of french litterature that puts accents or other pronounciation modifiers on capital letters.

It is a sentence's context which should enable a reader to "mentally add" any accent or pronounciation modifier which may be missing on a word's capital letter. THAT is the rule, THAT is how text is supposed to be written, and that is how text should be read.

and i fuckin' know my french grammar, i would conistently make under 10 mistakes on most of Bernard Pivot's "dictees" when i was in high-school. I can school your ass at french spelling *and* grammar any time.

QWERTY Standard

[EnsilZah]

QWERTY is a standard, all the schools, businesses and all other public facilities have them, maybe you could bring one to work, that's about limits your possibilities when you're outside your house. If you had a keyboard with E-Ink on the key tops, which every user could map as he/she pleases, you could get this to work, but which School/Business/Public facility would spen extra money on something they're sure no one would use ?

Alternative Text

[peterdaly]

I wonder what would come out of the genetic algorithm if "first post!" was the text that what used as the sample.

Seriously though, I type nothing like Shakespear or the text in KJ Bible. I can hardly even understand the KJ Bible.

This also brings up the topic of purpose built keyboards. Would a "Linux Kernel Hackers Keyboard" fed by the kernel source be much more efficient than QWERTY? For that matter, could each programming language have a "most preferred" layout? How about professions?

I would be very interested to know how much the keyboard changed as different texts were put into it. Also what the increased profficiency was over other keyboards in the "set."

-Pete

Re:Alternative Text

[shlong]

FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT
corpus:
find /usr/src -name "*.[ch]" -type f -print |xargs cat

201511526:
g u x , ; m l d f p
c e i a o h r t s n
q ' y . j z k b v w

Notice the de-emphasis of the 'g' key ;-)

Re:Alternative Text

[TheAJofOZ]

In user interfaces, consistency is king. Having special keyboards for special purposes would be an extremely bad idea as it means you have to learn to type all over again when you switch tasks - much less efficient even in the long run.

In fact, I and many other people do something which is reasonably similar to this - I play multiple musical instruments. Saxophone and piano are different enough that I don't get confused between them, but saxophone and clarinet are similar enough that their differences causes a great number of errors. The human brain learns fingerings for instruments so that they become subconcious acts and I can concentrate on the tone/timing etc of the music rather than what I'm doing with my fingers. The same thing happens when you type - it becomes subconcious. Switching instruments or keyboards destroys this subconcious ability because things have suddenly changed and so you actually loose productivity.

That's the reason that I will likely never bother learning the DVORAK keyboard, because I'm much more efficient overall with QWERTY. I can sit down at any computer and immediately begin typing at full speed. So basically, unless you can provide me with *really* significant speed gains (> 50%) it's not worth switching to a new keyboard layout because I'd loose efficiency everytime I sat down at another computer.

The other alternative I suppose, would be to create a keyboard that is so different that it doesn't interfere with my knowledge of QWERTY keyboards at all (like piano and saxophone), then it would be worth considering.

wow...

[kevin lyda]

uh-oh. you know, if jwz was annoyed by all the keyboards out there when he wrote xkeycaps a few years of people messing with this and submitting their own keyboards should really piss him off.

C code?

[ForceOfWill]

I limited this experiment to the 30 keys under the four fingers of the two hands. They include the 26 letters of the English alphabet and four punctuation symbols (comma, period, quote, and semicolon). (A QWERTY layout typically has the slash in this region instead of quote.) Other punctuation was ignored. ... I also needed a corpus of sample text... I added... about 100,000 lines of C code.

Am I the only one who thinks optimizing for C code is silly when you ignore vital symbols like braces, brackets, and numbers even? At least he included the semicolon.

Re:C code?

[WhaDaYaKnow]

Am I the only one who thinks optimizing for C code is silly when you ignore vital symbols like braces, brackets, and numbers even? At least he included the semicolon.

Not to mention the fact that C code is normally not written starting at the first character contiguously to the last character.

I know I move the cursor around a LOT (with the arrow, page up/dn, home, end keys).

A better way may be to do a capture of a person actually typing. The problem is that then you'd have to filter out typos, but I can see that's doable. This would be a far more 'real world' approach. Unless we are the only ones that are frequently using a large set of keys that where not included...

IBM's ATOMIK for PDA's

[Hollinger]

IBM did this in 2k1 for PalmOS PDA's, and called it ATOMIK (Alphabetically Tuned and Optimized Mobile Interface Keyboard). It's from our Alphaworks, and is designed so that it has:
1. Higher movement efficiency than any other existing touch keyboard.
2. Alphabetically-tuned layout: Generally, letters from A to Z run from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the keyboard. This layout helps novice users find letters that are not yet memorized.
3. Letter connectivity of common words: Many common words or comment fragments of words, such as "the" and "ing" are totally connected.

You might want to take a look at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/zhai/topics/virtualke yboard.htm and scroll down for a list of very good research papers.

Before edition...

[Karpe]

...it was a Ask slashdot submission, and read: "I swtchrd my computre keybord to teh Dvorka layoot bout a yaer ago. But nbw I've gonn nad donn somethng raelly ouhlnadsh. I trid to discovr teh most efffcinet layoot posibel wth a getetic algorthm. It's wetird-lokng, but I m typnig wth ti noow. I ptu teh gorry detials up on the Web. Wht I sak is hw teh ehll do I chnage ti bak?!

Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[pslam]

Unfortunately this program uses the same faulty assumptions that Dvorak used to design his keyboard layout. Namely the following:

• Alternating between hands each key is fast
• Hands are not allowed to move left or right
• All four fingers on each hand must rest on the same row
• Moving up or down a row is slow, because of the above
• You don't use your thumbs except for space

Where did these assumptions come from? I've got about 15 years of piano playing under my belt, and I find the standard "touch typing" rules very strange choices indeed. I type in a pretty free-form style at about 150wpm, depending on coffee. So, I'll disprove these assumptions one by one:

• Alternating between hands each key is the absolute hardest action to do quickly. If you have a piano piece which has a segment like this (there's a few famous pieces like this) it'll either be relatively slow or you'll be practising it for months. Runs of keys in the same hand are far faster. I'd say about 5 times faster.
• Why are hands not allowed to move left or right? If you have 8 keys to press, all of which reside to the right of the 'D' key, I move my left hand right a few keys! What's the point in keeping it where it is and making your right hand do more work and even stretch to reach the central columns?
• Why must all 4 fingers rest on the same row? For a start, your fingers aren't even the same length! Place your hands naturally on a table, and compare to where the keys would be. You'll find that they would have been on "a,w,e,f" and "j,i,o,;". Somewhat luckily, qwerty keyboards have all of the vowels except "u" under these keys. There's no reason you can't have your fingers over arbitrary rows. With a bit of hand strength building, this is easy.
• Moving up and down rows is only slow if you "float" above the keyboard (not resting your wrist on the table/rest) and move your entire arms back and forward. This would be an awful technique to use and I'd suspect it would lead to strain problems very quickly. Stretching your fingers forward and backwards is fast. And with the previous point, this is mostly irrelevant anyway.
• So, why aren't we allowed to use thumbs for typing normal keys? It's perfect for hitting keys on the bottom row when all the others have been tied up. Just then, I typed "up." with right hand "2-4-1" (where 1 is thumb, 5 is little). Why? Because when fingers 2,4 have been tied up on the top row, the most convenient finger to use is my thumb. Try it.

Not to discourage trying to find new keyboard layouts too much, but it's best to start really from scratch and question the basis of all the original assumptions. The rules need to include:

• Model the positioning of the hands and fingers in detail. If you remove the restrictions that "touch-typing" enforce, then the key-to-finger mapping also depends on context.
• Encourage runs of keys in the same hand. About 3-4 keys in the same hand before switching is optimum.
• Discourage rapid switching between hands (every key, for example).

My theory about carpal tunnel and other typing related injuries is that "touch typing" is actually to blame. It encourages stiffening of the wrists and hands, discourages stretching, and generally leaves your hands as weak as they were before you started typing.

My advice to anyone that uses classical "touch typing" is to learn to the point of about 40wpm, and switch to improvisation. My advice to anyone wanting to switch to Dvorak for speed, or to reduce strain: it's ultimately limited by the speed of one-key-per-hand switching which is about 120wpm. From my experience with both, you're better off sticking with qwerty and going free-style.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[The Pim]

I think you have a combination of unusual motor skills and incorrect reasoning.

Alternating between hands each key is the absolute hardest action to do quickly. If you have a piano piece which has a segment like this (there's a few famous pieces like this) it'll either be relatively slow or you'll be practising it for months. Runs of keys in the same hand are far faster. I'd say about 5 times faster.

Runs on the same hand are faster than alternation, sure. But alternation is much faster than arbitrary motions of one hand. Given the variety in English, optimizing for long runs will win on a very few words, and screw up the layout for everything else. I challenge you to refute this.

Dvorak does follow this principle for some short runs: th, sh, wh, rt, nd, and ng are all nice combinations that move in the pinky-to-index direction on one hand. But gymnastics with one hand will kill most typists, and alternation is about avoiding this.

Why are hands not allowed to move left or right? If you have 8 keys to press, all of which reside to the right of the 'D' key, I move my left hand right a few keys! What's the point in keeping it where it is and making your right hand do more work and even stretch to reach the central columns?

This requires incredible foresight and motor skills. For most people, the key to finding a key quickly is knowing its position relative to a fixed reference.

Why must all 4 fingers rest on the same row? For a start, your fingers aren't even the same length! Place your hands naturally on a table, and compare to where the keys would be. You'll find that they would have been on "a,w,e,f" and "j,i,o,;". Somewhat luckily, qwerty keyboards have all of the vowels except "u" under these keys. There's no reason you can't have your fingers over arbitrary rows. With a bit of hand strength building, this is easy.

I might agree about the natural position of the fingers (though I suspect the natural position is actually somewhere in-between asdf and awef). But the idea that each finger can be on its own row is just wrong for normal hands. Ask some normal people to try it, and they'll tell you.

Moving up and down rows is only slow if you "float" above the keyboard (not resting your wrist on the table/rest) and move your entire arms back and forward. This would be an awful technique to use and I'd suspect it would lead to strain problems very quickly. Stretching your fingers forward and backwards is fast. And with the previous point, this is mostly irrelevant anyway.

Resting wrists on the table, and stretching fingers without moving the hand, are both generally recognized as major contributors to CTS and other typing injuries. When I learned piano, I was definitely taught to keep my wrists up and move my hands with my fingers (eg, when reaching for a black key, the hand should advance).

So, why aren't we allowed to use thumbs for typing normal keys? It's perfect for hitting keys on the bottom row when all the others have been tied up. Just then, I typed "up." with right hand "2-4-1" (where 1 is thumb, 5 is little). Why? Because when fingers 2,4 have been tied up on the top row, the most convenient finger to use is my thumb. Try it.

I tried it. It's a disaster for me. Typing up with 2-4 is hard enough, requiring an awkward stretch of the ring finger. Getting to . with the thumb requires me to twist my whole arm in addition to contorting my hand, and hitting a target after such a long travel with such a fat digit is quite unreliable. Plus, this leaves my hand totally out of position for any subsequent typing.

I would think that given your claim that different fingers can easily go to different rows, you would prefer 2-5-4.

My theory about carpal tunnel and other typing related injuries is that "touch typing" is actually to blame. It encourages stiffening of the wrists and hands, discourages stretching, and generally leaves your hands as weak as they were before you started typing.

I'm not a doctor, but this flies in the face of all the medical advice I've read. What you call "stiffening" is what most people would call making gentle, comfortable motions. What you call "stretching" is what most people would call excessive and unnatural motion. What you call "leaving weak" is what most people would call avoiding strain. Maybe your hands can take it, but most people's can't.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[Dixie_Flatline]

The big flaw in your argument is probably the one that you think is the best, namely that we should be encouraging runs of 3 to 4 letters on one hand.

Alas, the problem with this is that you're going to end up with a dominant hand. If you put 'the' in the middle of the right hand side of the keyboard, the right hand will be typing that a million times a day. Sure, it's faster, but it's not going to be ergonomically better.

Nobody that's typing for pure speed is going to use a normal keyboard. A chording keyboard will let you break 200wpm if you're good with it.

Besides, I'm not sure why you'd say that alternating keystrokes by hand is slower. It's clear to my that my left and right hands can type keys nigh simultaneously. It's just a matter of getting your hands to move quickly and precisely enough so that a keystroke from your right hand is instantaneously followed by a keystroke from your left hand. Having multiple keys close together so that they can be hit by the same hand merely makes it a little more convenient to coordinate.

And surely, as a piano player, you've heard the stories about players 'trilling' on two keys repeatedly, for years, and are now experiencing pains from it?

Lastly, I think that the best keys for the thumb are 'backspace', 'delete', 'space', and 'enter'. I use these keys far more than most letter keys every day. On average, I use the space key every 5 letters, and I probably use the backspace key once every 10. :)

Check out the kinesis ergonomic keyboards. If only they could have moved 'shift' so that I didn't have to use my pinky all the time.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[His name cannot be s]

Finally! Someone who types like me!

Really, I too learned to play the piano first. When I was about 10 I started to hunt and peck on a computer, and I learned my own uniqe style.

I found that not only can I out-type the touch-typists I know (including my wife at 100+ wpm), I also have the unique ability of being somewhat fault tolerant. I year or so ago I sliced open my index finger with a knife, and I ended up having it in a big-ass bandage for a couple of weeks. I just didn't use that finger, and kept a very fast pace on the keyboard. I was amused.

I also find that I lose about 10-15 wpm when I switch away from my IBM Selectric keyboard, which is why I buy every one I run across, and have one on every computer I use. Drives the people at work somewhat nuts 'cause it's quite loud, when I'm cranking out code. ;)

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[Tablizer]

(* Not to discourage trying to find new keyboard layouts too much, but it's best to start really from scratch and question the basis of all the original assumptions. *)

Hmmmm. Let's see. What if we also type with our nose, toesies (foot), tonque (Gene Simpson model), and other body parts that Mommy won't let me say.

Since some people can fart tunes (heard on Howard), perhaps that can also be used as an input device. Turret's syndrom? No problem, sample it.

Different specialties may also benefit from specialized keyboards. For example, Bill Gates's keyboard can have phrases associated with each key to save typing of common patterns.

Such phrases may include, "Crush them to death!", "Grease the OEM's!", "Your'e fired, loser!", "Any ideas for new FUD?", "Shread it now!", "So what, Java is also buggy", "Blame it on Linux", "Who gives a f___ what the judge said!", "What's wrong with rebooting? Everybody is used to it anyhow.", and "My singing lessons are working well, wouldn't you say?".

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[pslam]

Runs on the same hand are faster than alternation, sure. But alternation is much faster than arbitrary motions of one hand. Given the variety in English, optimizing for long runs will win on a very few words, and screw up the layout for everything else. I challenge you to refute this.

If all English words were made up of random letters, and had uniform occurance, this would be obvious. But because some words are vastly more common than others, and have a lot of similarity, this isn't so obvious. As you say, Dvorak promotes some runs like th, sh, wh - so why not extend to promote runs longer than two? You don't need to restrict to adjacent keys - so long as there's a different finger near the next key it'll be nearly as fast. However, my argument regretably lacks any data to back it up - much like yours does.

I might agree about the natural position of the fingers (though I suspect the natural position is actually somewhere in-between asdf and awef). But the idea that each finger can be on its own row is just wrong for normal hands. Ask some normal people to try it, and they'll tell you.

I see what you mean about it being somewhere in between. Perhaps I shouldn't have been quite so wide-sweeping with "one finger per row" statement. Some combinations are obviously ridiculous and would likely cause injury to yourself and the nearest 3 people. Other combinations aren't difficult and probably strain less than moving all of your fingers at once.

In general, my style tends towards "smoothing out" the stretching of fingers and movement of the wrists by predicting the required positions of each hand and moving progressively towards an optimum position for it. I agree that this is unusual, but I think that most people could learn this given time.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[The Pim]

As you say, Dvorak promotes some runs like th, sh, wh - so why not extend to promote runs longer than two?

A rough argument would be that to get longer runs, you would have to include both consonants and vowels in the same run, which would tend to violate the principle of putting vowels on one side, and common consonants on the other. I believe that without that, you will end up with many words that are awkward (non-run) one-hand combinations.

Also, English isn't that non-random. Ie, it is inevitable that optimizing for longer runs wins for fewer words.

You're right that I don't have evidence, but I have a very strong feeling that there are too many constraints for you to design a keyboard with long one-hand runs, without losing badly in other areas.

In general, my style tends towards "smoothing out" the stretching of fingers and movement of the wrists by predicting the required positions of each hand and moving progressively towards an optimum position for it. I agree that this is unusual, but I think that most people could learn this given time.

You may be right, but I have a gut aversion to any technique that requires more motion and dexterity. When I typed qwerty, I had a self-taught style (that I can't remember in any detail). When I learned Dvorak, I did it by the book, and now have pretty orthodox touch-typing technique. I feel distinctly more comfortable now when I type, and given all the horror stories about typing injuries, that factor ranks very high for me.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[rusty0101]

I made a very brief test of both layouts, awef ijio; and qefb njip, and found that the awef jio; felt both more natural, and resulted in fewwer errors. (I was continuously retyping in the second layout, yet almost had no problems at all with the first.)

I think part of this is that at the very least the index and pinkies were where they were expected to be, and the middle fingers were ok moving around.

I will give this a bit more of a workout myself, and see if my error rate and speed improve.

-Rusty

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[GrouchoMarx]

I'll assume for the moment that everything you said above is perfectly valid and accurate... for a piano keyboard. I've never played the piano, so I will defer to your expertise in the matter. However, a piano keyboard and a computer keyboard are two very very different things, and as such I'm not surprised that they have different "typing" characteristics.

A piano keyboard consists of two rows of keys, each row an average of about 2 inches long by a quarter or half inch (black or white keys) wide, and each row runs for well over a meter. (Yes, we are mixing Imperial and Metric measurements, woot!) There are 88 keys, all of which are used on a regular basis (depending on the music). For that, a semi-free form setup makes sense. You can't have a perfectly stable home row, because the keyboard is simply too wide to keep your hands in the same place all the time. You can also travel with one hand, because you can go on for a long way with one hand with that many keys and many musical pieces have a climbing scale that asks you to play 9 keys in consecutive order. There are 3 shift keys... for the feet.

A computer keyboard, by contrast, is a set of some 40 primary keys plus a ton of auxiliary keys that are used far less frequently (arrows, function keys, number pad, PgUp/PgDn, etc.). There are 3 shift keys, also for the hands. Each key is 18 mm square, and arranged in 4 disjoint rows of about 10 keys. (I'm including numbers and some puncutation keys here.) There are a few common runs in the English language and different ones in other languages, but they are not as long as in music, and the keyboard itself is a quarter as wide. Optimizing for runs is far more difficult. And there is one extra key that is hit more than any other, the space bar, that is oriented specifically to make it the easiest to hit.

Computer typists probably do free-form a little from time to time. I know I do on occation, espeically when typing short things. But as I type this, I'm touch typing and doing just fine. I'm sure your method works wonderfully on a piano. But that doesn't mean it will work on a computer keyboard.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[Old Wolf]

You are quite right. Little sequences of adjacent fingers on the same hand are very fast. Also, it seems that sequences of letters on the same row are fast too. Example words:

johnny-jump-up
typewriter
flagfalls

or, the ideal word for speed typing, "pokwer" (my record standing at 50 correct renditions in 8.43 seconds).

Also, I notice now that I have unconsciously developed some free-form combinations that dont conform to the "official" method of touch typing. Perhaps I can consciously add some more :)

I also found your comment on "up." interesting. For me, my thumb is about in the position of 'n' and it is uncomfortable to move it across 3 places. However, since you are a pianist, I would guess you are pivoting on the 'p' and swinging the thumb across, which you would be very used to doing on the piano (this also seems to be transferring the weight of your hand over to the right - so how would you type "up.ya") ?

(Warning - dont try this in your browser window -- the first time I practised it, it deleted my last paragraph in this message, so I switched to Notepad, and then it tried to shut down windows (twice!).

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[RedWizzard]

Typing "up" with 2-4 is hard enough, requiring an awkward stretch of the ring finger. Getting to . with the thumb requires me to twist my whole arm in addition to contorting my hand, and hitting a target after such a long travel with such a fat digit is quite unreliable. Plus, this leaves my hand totally out of position for any subsequent typing.

It seems to me that you're trying to avoid moving your hands horizontally. If you stop trying to keep your index finger on the 'j' column you won't find getting to 'p' a stretch and your thumb should be moving toward the '.' too. I find 2-4-1 quite natural even though I usually only use my thumbs for space.

There are basically two types of typing tasks - copying text from another source and composing text as you type it. Touch typing seems to be designed for the copying case, where you can't afford to look at the keyboard. You said "for most people, the key to finding a key quickly is knowing its position relative to a fixed reference". But if can afford to look at the keyboard you don't have maintain a fixed reference, you can always re-establish where you are. And the "composing text" type of task permits frequent glances at the keyboard. Which is what I do a lot (I'm a programmer). So for me touch typing is not necessary and I find the most of what pslam was talking about makes sense. Note that piano playing also allows and requires a lot of looking at the keyboard.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[Sentry21]

I have a few points to make regarding your post, and the one you quoted. I will make them thus:

I think you have a combination of unusual motor skills and incorrect reasoning.

I think s/he has large hands and is used to moving them great distances (piano) in order to accomplish what s/he suggests. Not for everyone, for sure, but there are interesting points made.

This requires incredible foresight and motor skills. For most people, the key to finding a key quickly is knowing its position relative to a fixed reference.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. I was arguing vim vs. textedit or some garbage text editor like that, and my opponent stated that having the editor fill in 'if () {' when you type 'if' and then putting the cursor between the () is great, because 'how hard is it to hit the end key?'. My argument was that it's not hard, but it's easier for me to type the whole thing out by hand than move it over and guess which is the end key (I always use delete, and some keyboards have those six keys moved up or down) or to look, refocus (my eyes take time to refocus even a few cm difference). I think this is, while boring, a good example: without reference, even an 'end' key isn't that fast to use.

Resting wrists on the table, and stretching fingers without moving the hand, are both generally recognized as major contributors to CTS and other typing injuries.

And other injuries. I float when I type, which means I'm sometimes inaccurate, but firstly, I partly rest the weight of my hands on the keys, just enough to take some load off, and secondly, mousing, in which I DO rest my wrist, has resulted in my having a very weak and easily hurt wrist, as I cannot take any weight on it at all while it's bent (i.e. knuckle pushups fine, regular are no-go). The only solution to this would be to get a wrist-rest mousepad, which I don't have desk space for. Floating results in you keeping your hands where they're comfortable, and lets you move your hands faster when necessary, without having to stretch fingers this way or that.

Just then, I typed "up." with right hand "2-4-1" (where 1 is thumb, 5 is little). Why? Because when fingers 2,4 have been tied up on the top row, the most convenient finger to use is my thumb. Try it.

I tried it. It's a disaster for me. Typing up with 2-4 is hard enough, requiring an awkward stretch of the ring finger. Getting to . with the thumb requires me to twist my whole arm in addition to contorting my hand, and hitting a target after such a long travel with such a fat digit is quite unreliable.

When you hold your hand still, it certainly is uncomfortable, but playing around just now, I've found that there's an easy way to make it simple: dance. Don't hold your hand still and try and move your fingers to the key, dance it along, move the hand left to right, and then hit the '.' key with your thumb by swinging it in towards your palm and glancing off the key. It sounds pretty odd, but it works surprisingly well for me, and I'm going to try to make it a habit. It may improve my already fast typing, though it may cost me some already-rare accuracy. Enh, not like anyone ever reads anything I type. :P

I would think that given your claim that different fingers can easily go to different rows, you would prefer 2-5-4.

I find that this is a much more awkward way to type it, whcih actually causes great pain and suffering to untold millions, or at least, to my fingers.

It seems to me that your typing style is heavily influenced by the 'hold your damn hand still!' school of typistry. Understandably, this probably works well for you, but I, and many others, have found it far too rigid. The fact is, not everyone can fit into the same form as everyone else (like the original poster said, not all fingers are the same length, not even yours, let alone everyone's), so for some people, the 'dance' method that I use works much better.

The original poster quoth:

Model the positioning of the hands and fingers in detail. If you remove the restrictions that "touch-typing" enforce, then the key-to-finger mapping also depends on context.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. When I lay my fingers down on the keyboard to rest, I often find them spelling out 'a,w,e,f j,i/o,o/p,\'' (as in, a quote before the end of the quote), though 'a,s,d,f/g m,k,l,\'' is not uncommon, nor is anything else, really.

The benefit of the dance school of typistry is that it doesn't matter where your fingers rest while you're resting (asdf jkl; really cramps my fingers up), because no matter where they are, they'll be somewhere else as soon as you start typing. It also means I never have to type with my pinky, which is good because I have very weak pinkies and when I do anything (like hit Shift) with them too much at once they start hurting very much and I'm forced to use another finger anyway).

Careful observers will notice typos in my posts 99% of the time. Carefuller observers will notice that 99% of them are not hitting the wrong key, but rather hitting a key ahead of when it should - i.e. 'beacuse' or 'tehn'. Before anyone criticizes my lecturing about typing, this is a matter of two fingers getting signals crossed, or one hand getting ahead of the other, and happens in anything I do, irrelevant of my typing style.

My theory about carpal tunnel and other typing related injuries is that "touch typing" is actually to blame. It encourages stiffening of the wrists and hands, discourages stretching, and generally leaves your hands as weak as they were before you started typing.

I'm not a doctor, but this flies in the face of all the medical advice I've read. What you call "stiffening" is what most people would call making gentle, comfortable motions. What you call "stretching" is what most people would call excessive and unnatural motion. What you call "leaving weak" is what most people would call avoiding strain. Maybe your hands can take it, but most people's can't.

I don't know that 'most people's can't', but certainly not everyone can. However, as I mentioned before, the biggest problem I have is when using my mouse. Most people, when they type 'properly', have to rest their wrists on the table; this requires bending the wrists back (typically) as far as they will go, usually 80-90 degrees. This is VERY bad for the tendons and muscles. Wrist-wrests are a partial solution, but only in otherwise perfectly ergonomic environments. Most of the type, they simply lower the angle at which the wrist bends. The typing style I use, and, I suspect, that the original poster uses, leaves the wrists usually at a 0 degree angle along the top of the arm, or a 0 degree angle along the bottom of the arm. This is a natural and easy range of movement, and has caused me no problems in ten years.

My theory is that mousing is what's causing wrist injuries. I've never met anyone with wrist problems from their computer in the hand they don't use for mousing (maybe a coincidence, who knows), but I've seen a lot of people who, despite having wrist-rests for keyboards, don't have them for their mouse. My own problems, as I said, are with the mouse. Perhaps this should be looked into, or perhaps I'm stupid. Oh well.

--Dan

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[The Pim]

There are basically two types of typing tasks - copying text from another source and composing text as you type it. Touch typing seems to be designed for the copying case, where you can't afford to look at the keyboard. You said "for most people, the key to finding a key quickly is knowing its position relative to a fixed reference". But if can afford to look at the keyboard you don't have maintain a fixed reference, you can always re-establish where you are.

It's funny that this didn't think of this: I'm so used to touch typing, that it doesn't occur to me to look at the keyboard, ever (except for typing unusual keys). I tend to think that having two techniques--one for blink typing, one for looking at the keys--is a waste, compared to concentrating on one. But I have touch-typed for so long that it may just be me. I also prefer to keep my eyes on the screen, even if I am not copying from anything.

It seems to me that you're trying to avoid moving your hands horizontally. If you stop trying to keep your index finger on the 'j' column you won't find getting to 'p' a stretch and your thumb should be moving toward the '.' too.

Again, probably true--when I look at they keys and (consciously) allow my hands to wander, I can do 2-4-1. But it feels to me like so much excess motion, I can't really get comfortable with it. Plus the fact above: I don't want to adopt any habits that require looking at the keys.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[The Pim]

I think s/he has large hands and is used to moving them great distances (piano)

Probably. (I rebelled against the piano long enough ago that I'm sure it has no influence on my typing.)

When you hold your hand still, it certainly is uncomfortable, but playing around just now, I've found that there's an easy way to make it simple: dance.

I tried it--and you're right. I had to make a conscious adjustment, but when I let my hands "roam free", 2-4-1 worked. But as I said in another post, I don't like having to look down to orient myself, and I'm uncomfortable with so much motion. And my gut feeling is that it is harder on the hands.

It seems to me that your typing style is heavily influenced by the 'hold your damn hand still!' school of typistry. Understandably, this probably works well for you, but I, and many others, have found it far too rigid.

Undoubtably true on both points. But I would suggest (if you have not) that you try touch typing with the Dvorak layout. It requires significantly less finger-travel, so keeping your hands relatively still is less of a problem.

My theory is that mousing is what's causing wrist injuries.

I'm inclined to agree. Part of my problem is that I have an obsessive habit of clicking around while I'm reading, and this is most often what makes my hands sore.

Re:Faulty assumptions used for the benchmark

[The Pim]

Ever watched a one handed typist? I know one at work, and she's blazingly fast with one hand .

August Dvorak designed keyboard layouts for single left and right hands. I actually learned the right-hand layout once for fun, though I didn't stick with it long. Does your friend use a special layout?

Anyway, I'm sure your friend is fast, but are you really arguing that alternation between hands doesn't let most people go faster?

Re:Enquiring Onanists....

[Dun Malg]

Another interesting observation about QWERTY I've heard is that the word "typewriter" uses keys that live in one row. Speculation is that Sholes included as one of his layout criteria "must be able to type product name quickly in demos".

why a genetic algorithm...

[danboo]

when there's a finite number of layouts? Yup, just 265,252,859,812,191,058,636,308,480,000,000 possibilities. I'm sure the guys at distributed.net would love to set up a project to figure this out.

- danboo

Re:That's all fine and dandy...

[bc3-au]

Actually re-learning to type with a better layout is quite quick.

I tried dvorak with the earlier versions of NT which allowed keyboard re-mapping and found myself bettering my typing speed, with less errors within 2 weeks.

Only problem then was the fact that stupid windows had keyboard layout set as a user preference, not a machine preference. It was *VERY* difficult remembering qwerty when trying to log in. (I'd rearranged my keys but login was done in default, not my personal mapping)

I should go out and buy a keyboard with a dvorak layout, but keyboards these days are so badly contstructed.

Self-customized keyboards....

[RalphTWaP]

It sounds like the interesting possibility almost grasped here is the possibility of producing a self-customized layout on the fly.

hook the keyboard driver and tokenize input into words (corrections included where possible), feed through a spell-checker (to find what word was likely the target), and re-insert as input through the algorithm. Admittedly, this makes it more of a neural-net than a GA, but it is continuously evolving, and eventually, you should even out on the best keyboard layout for what you type on a daily basis

I expect my '_' key to end up somewhere on the home row in a couple of weeks (programming = bad typing habits)

Re:Remapping the keyboard

[alienmole]

It could be done pretty easily with a small hardware mod, which could be installed inside the keyboard. For example, a microcontroller like the PIC or 68HC11 could be connected to the keyboard cable output, to read it and translate each value, and send the desired value on to the PC. This would mainly be a programming project, it doesn't require much electronics knowledge since the circuits are very simple and can be copied from similar devices. Here's some info about keyboard interfacing - there's plenty more if you search.

Link to code is broken - Here's the right one

[RedCard]

The link to the code on the provided web page is broken.

The proper address to the location of the tar.gz file is:

http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz

--R

more qwerty myths...

[prockcore]

" It was intentionally made to slow people down, so that they didnt jam the keys."

Grr, didn't I just go over this a few days ago?

Everything you ever thought you know about the QWERTY layout was *wrong*.

http://www.independent.org/tii/news/liebowitz_ec on omist.html

Re:more qwerty myths...

[The Pim]

Everything you ever thought you know about the QWERTY layout was *wrong*.

http://www.independent.org/tii/news/liebowitz_econ omist.html

Liebowitz's article does not debunk anything. It merely gives evidence that some studies were flawed, puts forward its own flawed and ambiguous studies, and entirely ignores the compelling non-empirical arguments for Dvorak's superiority. (Do you not believe anything that has not been established by studies?) Let's not even mention the fact that Liebowitz has a strong prejudice about market efficiency to support (oops, mentioned it!).

Marcus Brooks has a longer rebuttal. I actually do not find it totally satisfactory either, but it should certainly make clear that Liebowitz has little credibility.

Slashdot from '99

[dirkmuon]

The Myth of Qwerty features extensive discussion over the same ground.

The author's list of rules is predicated upon many assumptions about the act of typing. Has any been verified scientifically? I think not. To discover whether the Dvorak keyboard or any other keyboard provides verifiable benefits beyond QWERTY would require extensive training and testing of a large sample population.

Of course, if you like Dvorak and any other layout better than QWERTY, then you should use it.

Lest we forget why this all came about...

[anewman]

The current QWERTY keyboard design came about in the early 20th century, because typewriters which had efficent keyboard layouts were jamming, and there was no anti-jamming mechanism except to slow the typist down. However, once there was an anti-jamming mechanism, the amount of money lost from the industry created to basically teach people how to type quickly was so ingrained that nobody wanted to get rid of it, even though they could get to a better alternative. Humans are actually capable of going much quicker, but the current QWERTY layout was designed for intentional inefficency.

Re:Suggestions for changing keys?

[Dixie_Flatline]

Don't bother with that. Learn to touch type; it's better in the long run.

I switched by finding a little gif of the dvorak layout, and staring real hard at it while I typed. It took me a good long while to switch, though, since I was a QWERTY touch typist. That meant that every time I went for a key, I had to fight my muscle memory, which is suprisingly strong. (By 'good long while' I mean about a month.)

Publication of results to Slashdot?

[michaelmalak]

This is the sort of thing one would expect to see in SIGCHI conference proceedings. Although there were no experimental controls or peer review of the results, it is telling of Slashdot's influence that such results are published on Slashdot first. As is, the quality would be top notch for a commercial rag such as Dr. Dobbs, and with just a bit of polishing would be published in an academic journal, serve as a Master's thesis, or even -- with quite a bit of "pushing" (expanding) of the ideas -- serve as a PhD at some schools.

Re:That's all fine and dandy...

[Decklarean]

Qwerty wasn't designed to slow people down... that's a myth.

Research on keyboard stuff found here:
http://web.mit.edu/jcb/www/Dvorak/

That Would Be Worth Relearning to Type

[FreeUser]

These are some very interesting insights, and I really hope you'll get together with the author of this piece and perhaps work out some optimized layouts based on these criteria.

1) I move my hands as well when I type (no formal typing education at all ... completely self-taught by simply doing, and I'm the fastest typer I know), though not to strike different keys with different fingers like a pianist, but rather to make the reach for some of the more distant keys more comfortable.

This does result in typos, however, some of which people will doubtless see here on /.

2) Your insight on the natural position of the fingers is brilliant, if obvious (as most brilliant things tend to be, in retrospect).

A layout and typing regime based on home keys as awef and jio; would be very interesting to develop, one allowing hand movement a la a pianist and one (which I personally would prefer) assuming the fingers return to their home coordinates after each letter is typed.

Indeed, I would break the possibilities out into several options:

1) awef jio; homekeys, no laterial or vertical movement
2) awef jio; homekeys, vertical movement but no laternal movement
3) awef jio; homekeys, vertical and lateral movement
4) awef jio; homekeys, lateral movement but not vertical movement

and then see which of the 4 results in the easiest, and quickest, typing movement.

I would surmise that #1 would be preferred by many who already know how to type and might not be able to make the adjustment to MOVEMENT like a pianist might, while those starting from scratch would find one of the other three more natural and useful.

An improvement of this nature is something I would be willing to try a new keyboard layout and typing regime for ... I played with dvorak once, but didn't find the improvement worth the trouble. This, on the other hand, would be more than worth the trouble.

A final aside to purists who are griping about the author's unfortunate use of the word Universal: with the exception of most physiscists and astronomers, virtually everyone misuses the world 'universal', be it a movie studio, a beauty pagent, a mechanic, or any number of other contexts.

It was obvious from the context of the discussion that the author was working on an optimized keyboard for use with the English language, so obvious as to not even warrant a comment. The fact that the author wrote the article in English, sampled English works (and programming languages) in his study, and published in that very same language, to a web site located in the heartland of America (Michigan) targeted at English speaking readers, should have provided a big enough clue even for those who are clue-challenged.

Non-english speakers screaming and yelling about how this (obviously) doesn't apply to their language are belaboring the painfully obvious, and come across more like that quintessential, insecure adolescent boy who, during a lecture on female sexuality stands up and declares "but boys are different!"

Of course an optimized german keyboard likely won't use the qwerz layout, but something very unlike qwertz, very unlike dvorak, and very unlike a keyboard optimized for English. Ditto for French, not to mention numerous languages that do not even use the Roman (or Cyrillic) alphabets, such as Hindi, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese. Pointing this out in the context of this discussion is akin to pointing out that a study on the aerodynamic properties of a piston-driven propeller don't map well to the art of flavoring a Hollondais sauce with the proper mix of spices, to which the 'universal' (in an earthly sense) response is generally something on the order of: No shit, Sherlock.

forget it

[Patrick13]

i had enough trouble switching from a standard keyboard to a MS "natural" keyboard -- it took me a month to stop typing qqq.xyz.com into my web browser instead of "www".

of course now that i have retrained myself to use touch type on the natural keyboard, i am a mess when I type anything on my g'friend's iBook...

damn laptops and those smaller keyboards.

He didn't use a genetic algorithm.

[leastsquares]

The algorithm he used was NOT a genetic algorithm, although it could be called an evolutionary algorithm. comp.ai.genetic FAQ

Wrong solution

[Rui del-Negro]

The portuguese layout is absolutely fine. I can type easily in all major languages. Stuff like Ñ, ö, Ý, û, etc., that don't even exist in Portuguese are very easy to type using the portuguese layout. The most common symbols are also in the right spots, so you don't have to keep pressing shift to get them. Unlike some "hacks" that existed about 15 years ago, the current standard Portuguese layout (based on QWERTY) is very good.

The "problem" is not the layout. The problem is programs designed for a specific layout that don't let you redefine your keys, and programs that simply don't support accented latin characters like 'é', 'ô', 'ã', etc., which are used by a lot of latin-based languages. Why should a keyboard be "compatible" with the american standard, when the americans write using latin characters...? Or, conversely, why should american keyboards look like, say, polish keyboards when they don't use any of those symbols? The computer should adapt to the user, not the other way around.

[tease]

Just because English is such a primitive language doesn't mean everybody else should be forced to put up with its limitations. ;-)

[/tease]

RMN
~~~

This is wrong

[WolfWithoutAClause]

It's based on evolution, which everyone knows is false. Afterall doesn't it say in the good book that man was made in Gods own image?

Whose image was this keyboard layout? Who is he to play at being God?

This is a good example of everything that's wrong with the world; just like GM foods. I don't want some Frankenkeyboard, that might spread its genes out into the environment, anymore than I want frankenfoods, we'll be knee deep in genetically modified keyboards next. Contact your congressman. This has to be stopped.

;-)

Question about the metric

[p3d0]

Fingers of the same hand can't be on both the top and bottom row.

I don't know about that one. Try typing "nice" on a qwerty. I find it quite natural that the index and middle fingers of both hands hit the "ni" and "ce" pairs in quick succession.

AZERTY

[oliverthered]

The 'french' always have there own quirky systems.
e.g.
Metric
Secam
Montreall
There own special time.
The own 0' latitude (well they wanted it!)
There own language (i.e. They hate slang from other languages creeping into french).

Re:AZERTY

[Glytch]

Uh, yeah. Metric is quirky. Only about 99% of the people on earth use it. And I think you're referring to the attempted 0 longitude back during the Revolution, not latitude. And as for slang, most France French speakers I know are pretty open minded. It's the more old-fashioned of the Quebec French speakers that get the most pissed off. Acadian French speakers just shrug and ask you to "pass une autre beer". Long live Franglais, breaking down barriers between cultures!

Windows is slow? Use faster hardware!

[Rui del-Negro]

I am not unhappy with the keyboard layout. QWERTY may slow down people typing in English (although that wasn't exactly its purpose) but works quite well for Portuguese (as I said, I'd only change a couple of letters).

What I am unhappy about is software that isn't designed or tested to work with different layouts (portuguese or other). Which can be easily solved by letting the user redefine the keyboard shortcuts, and letting people distribute adapted shortcut files.

RMN
~~~

... are the first step...

[Jetifi]

What I'd be really interested in seeing is a keyboard where each key is a small hi-res LCD display. Not do-able today, maybe, but imagine the things you could do with this.

It would not only allow for self-customising layout, but also things like when you press [shift], letters go upper-case, and the positions of the ''1'' and the ''!'' are reversed. When you press CTRL or ALT, the keys that do have functions assigned could get highlighted or something. The font of the letters could change according to the font you're writing with, or with the display font you're using... PC games could take advantage of this in very cool ways... all kinds of stuff.

I'm pretty sure this isn't really possible right now, but I can guess at some of the stumbling blocks. Durability would be one problem, although you could embedd the LCD in transparent keys. The contacts per key to make this happen would be ridiculous... managing 101-104 little displays would be an interesting problem.

Just an idea.

Keys that should be added

[Rui del-Negro]

Having used an Atari ST for a long time, I always found it a bit stupid that there aren't 'Help' and 'Undo' keys on PC keyboards. I thought it would be temporary, and they would eventually be added. Instead, what they did add were the (completely redundant and extremely annoying) Windows system keys (or 'winkeys', as some people call them).

At home I've been using the same keyboard for 15 years (a Cherry G81-1000, that looks and feels like the old IBM keyboards), so luckily I don't have to put up with those keys (when I have to use other keyboards I keep hitting them instead of Ctrl / Alt), but I still miss my 'Help' and 'Undo' keys from the ST.

Most programs now use F1 as the 'help' key. Doesn't make much sense but at least it's standard. Sort of. Some programs use Shift+F1 or Ctrl+F1. But 'undo' is nowhere near as standard. Some programs use Ctrl+Z, others use Alt+Backspace, and so on.

Personally I'd like to see dedicated keys for 'help' and 'undo', where repeatedly pressing Undo would do multiple levels of undo and pressing Alt+Undo would do a Redo (ie, undo the last undo).

What do you think? What keys should be added to (or removed from) PC keyboards?

RMN
~~~

Another idea

[Hassan79]

What about rearranging the positions of keys like "Home", "End", "Del", "BkSp" etc.? A good keyboard layout should also take into account the possibility to correct typos and move around in the text quickly, especially when it comes to writing program code.

Perl programming

[Our Man In Redmond]

I tried creating a keyboard using a set of Perl programs I wrote and ended up with all the punctuation in the home ruw. :(

Any real programmer's keyboard

[AaronW]

What I would like to see is a good programmer's keyboard designed for C, C++, and Java programming.

The current QUERTY (and DVORAK for that matter) layout requires too much use of the pinky finger (the weakest finger). I feel some of the keys would benefit from being moved elsewhere, for example the following:

SHIFT and ENTER.

I use shift so often I wish it were located in the middle of the space bar where I could hit it with my thumb.

I also wish common symbols used in programming didn't require shift all the time (i.e. *, +, ", {, }, &, !, %, (, ), and # (for shell scripts/Perl)}. My home keyboard is an improvement (a Northgate OmniKey/Plus) since it has a dedicated "*" key and the function keys at the left.

Also, for X I really like the added keys Sun has (like front, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, etc.)

-Aaron

Re:Any real programmer's keyboard

[Lozzer]

How about the best keyboard layout for brainf*ck?

<curse> <run>
> < + - . , [ ]
<space> <enter>

Space and enter are probably optional. One finger for each key that you need while programming, cool.

Re:That's all fine and dandy...

[mselmeci]

Buy a Dvortyboard. It's about 90 dollars, but can switch from QWERTY to Dvorak with a button; it changes the mapping of the keys so the computer still thinks it's using QWERTY even if you're using Dvorak. The good thing about it is that if you're playing a game that uses a certain arrangement of keys for actions (eg. vi keys in Nethack or xconq) you can switch back to QWERTY.

Right you are

[FreeUser]

The word "universal" actually never appears in my note.

Excellent point.

I read the article, then read the /. posts including the "this is too English-centric anti-American nonsense that always seems to get modded to +5 no matter how inappropriate it is (remarkable how provincially prejudiced many of those who accuse Americans of provincialism are, isn't it?), then rebbutted some of those arguments without going back to reread the article again. You're right ... the criticisms wouldn't have held had you used the word 'universal', but in fact you did not, making their criticisms even more asinine, their +5 moderation even more idiotic, and my expression of annoyance at their attempted, and less appropriate than usual, policing of 'international political correctness', even more justified.

Personalized KB, Try Bayesian Analysis

[dh003i]

Basically, what he has done is created a personalized keyboard, well-suited to the things which he frequently types.

Different people type different things; thus, different optimal results will be seen.

I'd also suggest that he try using a Bayesian Analysis to do this study; Bayesian Analysis and GA are very close to one another, but Bayesian Analysis is faster and is more widely accepted/used.

I smell updgrade profits

[Tablizer]

So everytime somebody comes up with a (allegedly) better keyboard layout using new technologies or new "optimized" assumptions, a new keyboard layout will come on market?

Sounds like the software development industry in general: learn a new language or paradigm every 5 years. (Just to find out that they keep reinventing LISP without knowing it :-)

If that kept happening, then perhaps what is needed is a programmable keyboard where the letters (including image of them) change to your personal preference. Then again, if you know it well enough, perhaps you don't need to see the letters.

Falsehood

[mindstrm]

Actually... it was not designed to make them type slow specifically, but was designed so that the strikers for letters that often followed each other were widely spaced to prevent jamming.

Dvorak can be somewhat faster, but more improtantly, it's more comfortable.
The difference is often exaggerated.

Qwerty design goals

[po8]

In a way. Qwerty was designed to keep mechanical typewriters from jamming, which meant physically separating the keys for common digraphs. This requirement is somewhat incompatible with the requirement that common digraphs be quickly typeable, hence some slowndown.

If Sholes and Densmore had just had computers to run evolutionary algorithms on, they presumably could have designed a better layout for mechanical typewriters... :-)

A Lisp Hacker's Keyboard?

[extrasolar]

When he put all that C code into his sample, I was thinking of all the times I have to reach for the parenthesis and the hyphen when writing Lisp code. Now Emacs makes Lisp quite a bit easier but it would be cool to have the parens where the T and Y keys are on the QUERTY keyboard and perhaps the hyphen where the U is. I think that would be sweet.

Starting algorithm is flawed

[balloonhead]

One point: in the list of common words, "thou" is quite high up (due to the works selected, including the bible); could the results not have been very different (and hence the layout) if this and similar "obsolescent" words were discounted? i.e. by using only contemporary works: although you could argue that these are large well known literary works etc., I think that works typed in the last 5-20 years (and hence next 5-50 years) may have a different (only slightly, but perhaps significantly) spectrum of words used and therefore the keyboard layout may change? And if this is the case, do we need to re-engineer our keyboards not only between languages but every few decades?

Reminds me of another story...

[localroger]

Seems that onceuponatime the helpful folks from WHO passed out strands of 28 beads, with meaningful color variations, and told them to move a bead a day beginning at menstruation to tell when sex was more or less likely to result in pregnancy.

The program was less than successful because many of the women felt the merit resided in the beads rather than the counting, and moved them around to suit themselves.

AH-HEM...

[Nindalf]

The Johnson Keyboard Layout

Their own quirky systems?!

[Bodrius]

Although I'm always eager to mock french ethnocentrism, this is silly:

METRIC

Everybody uses metric.

The only people still measuring things in feet, cubits, elephants or stones are USians, UKians, and some stone-age tribes spread throughout the globe.
And even the UKians show the intellectual ability to multiply and divide by 10 when they need to. Particularly when they send things to space.

LANGUAGE

At least they are aware there are other languages, beyond the names of food in your local "Taco Bell".

"MONTREALL": what are you talking about?

If you want something quirky to mock about the french, try their number/counting system. Just try writing numbers as they are dictated by a french person.

Another evolution condition..

[hyphz]

Hmm, interesting. I've been using Dvorak for a while now (and yes, I can still type fast on qwerty with the occasional pause). However, one thing I found about Dvorak was that spelling checkers become less useful on it - because of the closeness of common letters to each other, a Dvorak miskey tends to generate a correct spelling of the wrong word, rather than an incorrect spelling. This confounds automated spell checking. Has anyone tried to make a layout which minimises cases in which letters which can be substituted in words being next to each other is a Bad Thing?

Asterisk (the Gaul?)

[Rui del-Negro]

I normally use the asterisk on the numeric keypad (between '/' and '-').

By the way, an interesting thing about Adobe Premiere: in version 4 you could use the '+' and '-' keys in the numpad to zoom in and out. Since version 5, these stopped working and you now have to use the '+' and '-' keys in the main keyboard. They call it progress...

RMN
~~~

Using Dvorak

[Captain Chad]

Just for kicks I decided to switch to Dvorak after reading the article. The thing I miss most is being able to easily use the Windows keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-C, CTRL-V, and CTRL-Z) with just my left hand -- I use them a lot!

Also of interest is the cleanliness of the keys in the new configuration. (My keyboard has accumulated some sort of gunk, and the keys are discolored based on how frequently they are used.) In the new configuration, the entire home row is clean with the exception of the underscore/hyphen. In addition, all keys in the center of the keyboard are clean. As you move away from the center towards the periphery, the keys gradually become darker, with more dirt on the left half. So I have some empirical evidence to support the efficiency of the Dvorak keyboard.

Problems with switching regularly

[ErfC]

For a long time I used Dvorak at home, but for various reasons I left my work machine on QWERTY. Eventually I got up to about the same speed with both layouts, but there was no advantage for Dvorak. (If I didn't have to keep switching I probably would have happily stuck with Dvorak.) There was a disadvantage: I would find myself pressing the same key twice for two different letters. That was a weird feeling.

So I just gave in and stick to QWERTY. It works well enough. And with the amount of typing I do, I'd have to wear these wrist braces regardless of which layout I use, I think.

I can easily believe the reports I've heard that Dvorak is easier to learn, though; if I forgot where a key was, I could remember just by thinking of where it would likely be. It's a very logical layout. The only reason I know the QWERTY layout so well is from so many years of use.

Re:I did this!

[WowTIP]

On the language issue, yes, this guy's work loses a lot in other languages: in English, e.g., the most frequent letter is "e", while in Portuguese "a" occurs the most. I use both languages during the same day, there wouldn't be a perfect layout for both.

The solution of your "problem" exist in the .tar.gz at the homepage of that guy. I think.

Record everything you type during a day (or even better, a longer period of time) and figure out your perfect key-combo.